The ancient Egyptian was interested in the idea of ​​the resurrection and the other world and life after death, and he was preparing all the reasons for that and his ideas developed time after time to those statues known as “ushabti” to represent him in the other world and below we will review that in detail.

First: the label.

These small symbolic figurines, whose size ranged from 10-20 cm, were called “Ushabti”, which comes from the hieroglyphic verb “wšb” and “weap”, meaning to answer, that is, they are the answering statues because they answer the call in the other world.

Another name is “Shawabti”, which is believed to be derived from the word “Shawab”, a type of wood from which these statues were made from the Persia tree called ushabti, but we do not know precisely the main reason behind the name.

Second: – The idea of ​​making these statues, their beginning and development through ancient Egyptian times.

In the beginning, in the old state, there were what is known as the tombs of the footnote or followers. It is believed that they were sent with the cemetery owner to serve him, then the idea developed into mere mural drawings. Statues of servants, and then in the era of the Middle Kingdom, we knew the status of “ushabti”. They were made of porcelain and pottery and placed in the ushabti box, began to take the form of a mummy wrapped in the era of the Hyksos and reached its climax in the era of the modern state, where it began to be made of gold (King Tutankhamun’s ushabti) ​​and blue fines and became of high technical proficiency and in the late-era began to be made of green fiancé for kings and senior statesmen. For the common people, they were made of wax, pottery and clay. These statues remained until the Ptolemaic period, then gradually began to decline.

Third: – Its shapes, locations and numbers in the cemetery.

In the beginning, the ushabti was a single statue. Then, starting from the modern state era, the double ushabti, the ushabti lying on the mummy’s bed, and the ushabti who grind wheat began to appear. There was the “blue net mark” on the right arm, which is the symbol of protection. On the left arm the sign of “grandfather”, which is a symbol of Stability and began in the era of the modern state holding signs such as the “ankh” symbol of life, the stick “Al-Haqqa” the symbol of government, the “Jed” column as well, and the sign “Was” the symbol of protection. All this is in an Osiri position, and the distinction is made between the king and the common people through this royal logo and texts. The titles and the most important phrases written on the Ushabti “Let Osir shine” took the features of its owner because it expresses him in the other world. In the beginning, the features were not elaborate and then gradually began to be perfected at the highest level. Apis calf. This is because for every ten statues, there is a supervisor over them, and their number began to increase after that, and five other statues were added in some tombs to refer to the five days of the Nazis. During the nineteenth dynasty, an entire army of ushabti was found in a box, and they had a supervisor over them. The supervisor’s body was different In the ushabti about the statue of the average person. Some opinions attributed the increase in the number of ushabtis to the fact that the servants were the ones who made it for themselves and put it to express them with the owner of the cemetery.

Their locations varied inside the cemetery, sometimes next to the mummy and others at the head or feet of the deceased, or inside wooden coffins and pottery pots or scattered on the cemetery floor. And he wrote on it the texts of the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead, which contained these phrases: “O Ushabti if you are called to work in the cemetery, and there are difficulties, prepare yourself in my place at all times to sow the fields and irrigate the earth, and to move sand from the east to the west, and to say here I am.” This indicates On the function of the ushabti in the imagination of the ancient Egyptian, as there were various other texts on the ushabti that differed from one king or owner of a tomb to another and what he wanted to write on his ushabti.